Materials in Making

This chapter discusses the challenges involved in learning the banana tree on the head and the effects that learning the technique have on practitioners illustrate in exaggerated form how the acquisition of skill necessarily entails physiological, neurological, and psychological transformation. It offers an example of alternative developmental, phenomenological, and biocultural channels for thinking about the consequences of learning movement. The chapter explains laboratory-based studies of skill acquisition and sports psychology. It illustrates the micro-dynamics of movement learning, and to highlight its adaptive dimensions, separate out three dimensions of the process: bodily conditioning, shaping reflexes, and expanding capacity through experimentation. In the traditional style of Capoeira Angola a move that prepares the novice for a wider range of more advanced techniques employing the head to support the body's weight. The enormous cultural variation in skilled movement evident in the ethnographic record probably corresponds with subtly different tunings of the nervous system and brain, and diverse channels for neuroplasticity and bodily development.